George Combe (1788-1858) phrenologist & natural philosopher

John van Wyhe, Fellow, National University
of Singapore; Researcher, History & philosophy of science, Cambridge University.

George
Combe (1788-1858) was the most prolific British phrenologist
of the nineteenth century. Combe came from the large family (thirteen children
surviving in 1807) of an Edinburgh brewer. In their crowded home which the Combes
shared with servants at the base of Edinburgh castle (photograph), George never felt he received the attention he deserved as a child, though he derived his keenest pleasure from those brief moments when the eyes of the family turned on him while he amused them. His parents insisted on a rote religious education more out of a sense of propriety than of religious fervour. At school also Combe endured a harsh force-feeding educational regime, and occasionally the taws. Roger Cooter argued convincingly for the profound effects of Combe's upbringing for his stifled emotions, stolidness, sternness, and the importance of observing hierarchies, order and routine. Cooter also argued that phrenology filled a gap left by rejecting Calvinism although it is unclear that Combe was ever devout enough to experience a gap later.

Combe attended classes at Edinburgh university from 1802-4. Afterwards he was
apprenticed as a clerk to Writers to the Signet (lawyers). George's other brothers
became brewers, tanners, a sailor, and a baker. Only his younger brother Andrew
followed George in a more ambitious career; Andrew became a physician. With
increased social status and secure and promising employment, Combe began to
think of the education and learning appropriate for a gentleman. He began to
read current literature such as the Edinburgh Review and authors such as Adam
Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, William Cobbett, and to keep a diary.

The praise of others evoked Combe's highest enjoyment as he related in an autobiographical
fragment referring to his 1804 private elocution classes to overcome his "vulgar"
pronunciation:

These words [of vindication from the instructor] produced a thrill of pleasure
through my whole frame, for I had so strong a desire for praise for praiseworthy
qualities, and had so very rarely enjoyed the gratification of it, that this
commendation...wakened me to a higher sense of my own capabilities; or rather
gave sanction to emotions of ambition for a higher sphere of intellectual
life, of which I was conscious, although I feared that they originated in

Phrenology would later provide Combe with the certainty of that capacity:

When yet a child I was animated by the strongest ambition to do some great
and good service to my fellowmen, which should render me an object of their
love and respect. I conjured up schemes in my imagination for the gratification
of the desire until I wept in contemplating them....I owe to Phrenology, presented
to me by mere accident, a field in which it has been possible for me to pursue
this object...

In 1810 Combe joined a small weekly debating society, the Forum,
where young men discussed issues of the day such as the death penalty or the
comparative advantages and disadvantages of matrimony versus celibacy (matrimony
was voted preferable), or "Whether novel-reading is favourable or prejudicial
to morality?" Combe valued taking a stand on current issues at social gatherings
and displaying knowledge of "general topics, or in writing". Combe
became known as one who liked to do all the talking and to pronounce his opinions
on all subjects. Later in life the famous American abolitionist Frederick Douglass
observed after a social breakfast with Combe: "I was a listener. Mr. Combe did the most of the talking, and did it so well that nobody felt like interposing
a word, except so far as to draw him on. ...His manner was remarkably quiet,
and he spoke as not expecting opposition to his views. Phrenology explained
everything to him, from the finite to the infinite."

Many who knew Combe remarked that once he set into opinions he
was not easily shifted out of them and that he had little time for the opinions
of others. Francis Jeffrey later guessed as much when he offered an explanation
for Combe's devotion to phrenology: "Mr Combe's sense and energy having
been led, by some extraordinary accident, first to conceive a partiality for
[phrenology]—and then induced, with the natural ambition of a man of talent,
to make it a point of honour to justify his partiality". These characteristics
were important for Combe to defiantly, and unquestioningly, espouse phrenology
until his death in 1858. The irascible botanist and phrenologist Hewett C. Watson (with whom Combe eventually had a falling out) "said truly that I [Combe] was a good teacher but a bad learner". Clearly Combe turned what others saw as close-minded obstinance into an emphasis on his qualities as a tireless propounder of natural truths. Combe's nephew Sir James Cox later recalled that Combe had a "strong desire for posthumous fame".

In short, Combe was something of an opinionated egoist and exceedingly
keen on acquiring as much attention for himself as possible-so long as it was
respectable. As an egotistical phrenologist he was in good company. The history
of phrenology could be written as the biographies of egotistical men, beginning
with Gall, Spurzheim (the two indeed may have parted over a clash of egos),
Combe, H.C. Watson, Charles Caldwell, and John Elliotson, for whom Cooter remarked
phrenology was an "egotistically satisfying means of affronting the conventional."
It should not be taken as censure to appeal to these character traits for the
leading phrenologists. Instead it seems these character traits are important
parts of the explanation for their behaviour. Phrenology attracted such men
because of its promise of superlative intellectual authority with minimal effort.

Combe had been in practice as a Writer to the Signet for three
years when John Gordon's review of J.G. Spurzheim appeared in 1815. Combe readily
mocked Spurzheim's system along with so many other readers of the "literary
gospel of Edinburgh". The chance meeting with Spurzheim changed this and
Combe's life. Combe attended Spurzheim's next course of Edinburgh lectures and
later ordered plaster casts from London to study the science further, to "ascert[ain]
whether nature supported [Gall & Spurzheim] or not." Along with the
casts came the interest of his friends and colleagues. For the first time in
his life, Combe received attention from others, and on a subject about which
he could speak with authority as there were no other phrenologists in Britain
apart from Spurzheim and Forster in 1816-17.

Within two months of Spurzheim's departure from Edinburgh, Combe
published for the first time-on phrenology. Later in the same year Combe visited
Spurzheim in Paris (his first departure from Scotland) and sent his younger
brother Andrew to study medicine there. Spurzheim's phrenology was a rationalist
religion which the Combe brothers could join. The Combe brothers became firm
phrenologists, though George was always uncompromisingly outspoken and zealous
in his advocacy whereas Andrew was "far less fanatical and importunate
in his advocacy" as the actress Fanny Kemble recalled. In Edinburgh the
Combes met others who had been converted by Spurzheim's refutation of Gordon,
such as the scientific dilettante Sir George Steuart Mackenzie (1780-1848) and
the young evangelical minister David Welsh (1793-1845).

At the suggestion of Welsh, the Combes and some legal colleagues
of George, founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society (EPS) in February 1820.
It was the first phrenological body ever created. It was comprised mostly of
young middle-class professionals eager to join a scientific society, many of
whom had been converted by Spurzheim personally. The EPS grew quickly. By 1826
there were 120 members. Combe purchased a hall for the group's meetings and
their growing museum of casts and skulls.

In the 1830s and 1840s Combe used phrenology to espouse a rational
and secular reform of education and society. In the 1830s he devoted himself
wholly to the promulgation of phrenology. Combe was an ambitious man and travelled
extensively through Britain, Germany, and the United States on phrenological
tours. Over time he devoted himself ever more to his efforts to promote a philosophy
of natural laws and a secular society. His most famous work, The
Constitution of Man became one of the best-selling books of the 19th
century and helped to spread his version of naturalism far and wide. It is likely
that Combe's impact on the nineteenth century was as powerful as Charles
Darwin's.

Constitution sold approximately 350,000 copies between 1828 and 1900, an astounding number at the time and scarcely matched by any other book regardless of genre. In contrast, Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) sold only 50,000 between 1859 and 1900 (in the UK). Over 100 publishers produced Constitution continuously until 1899. Constitution's remarkable sales and the even larger number of people who read or were familiar with its philosophy of natural law, the amount of critical attention it received, and its influence make Constitution, and the phrenological naturalism
it catered, anything but peripheral to the history of nineteenth-century Britain. Few book's were more widely distributed or were so influential in changing the way people conceived of themselves and Nature.

The book's fame did carry a word for phrenology with it; but Constitution is not a book about phrenology. Instead, it is a book of natural philosophy which teaches that Man is as subject to natural laws as the rest of Nature — Physical, Organic, and Moral. Ignorance of or disobedience to the natural laws led to
"punishment" — such as catching a cold from exposure to the elements. The first steps towards the good life were to study and obey the distinct natural laws (notably excluding the Bible). Combe's book was hugely controversial from the 1820s through the 1850s. Evangelicals founded societies to oppose it, wrote books and articles against it, and sometimes even burned it! Thus fuss popularly believed to have resulted from Darwin's Origin of Species pales in comparison to that of Combe's Constitution, one of the most influential books of
the nineteenth century.

Further reading and related material on the author's British Museum site